Using the SELECT statement

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the SELECT statement is the key to using DocumentDB and selecting, finding, and filtering resources inside your collections.

The SELECT statement is described in the following syntax convention:

<select_query> ::=
SELECT <select_specification> 
    [ FROM <from_specification>] 
    [ WHERE <filter_condition> ]
    [ ORDER BY <order_by_specification>]

As you can see, a SELECT statement consists of the SELECT keyword as well as (optionally) the FROM and WHERE clauses.

It is possible to execute only the SELECT statement, as we will see later in this chapter. The following code snippet shows a simple example of only a SELECT statement:

SELECT ABS(-1) returns 
 [
  {
    "$1": 1
  }
]

Selecting some documents

In the previous chapters, we performed some basic querying against our collections. The following snippet is a simple query that returns all the first names inside the collection (the one we used...